Opposition mounts to moving atomic bomb material across the country

Nuclear watchdogs are fighting a proposal to ship tons of plutonium to the Los Alamos Lab in New Mexico, including the cores of nuclear warheads. The plutonium "pits," as they are known,  would be dismantled at the aging and structurally questionable lab atop an earthquake fault zone. A raging wild far also threatened the boundaries of the lab last year blackening surrounding hills. The US Department of Energy is currently holding hearings over the proposal to transport plutonium from the Savannah River Site nuclear weapons center in South Carolina to Los Alamos, almost clear across the country. Some of the waste may also be dumped at the WIPP plant in Carlsbad, NM. The "surplus" plutonium would then be shipped back across the country to a proposed MOX fuel fabrication plant where is would be mixed into civilian reactor fuel. This not only crosses the line between the military and civilian nuclear sectors but presents safety and disposal risks. No US reactor is designed to use the radiologically hotter MOX fuel and there is no current disposal site at all, let alone one adapted to taking waste fuel from MOX reactors. At a recent action around the Hiroshima-Nagasaki Days commemorations, six activists were arrested at the gates of the lab. (Pictured, l to r: Benjamin Abbott, Catherine Euler and Cathie Sullivan.